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Paper Computer Games:About
This page is all about the wiki''.'' The Paper Computer Games Wiki is an encyclopedic database of the Paper Computer Games franchise, their universe, related works, and more, that anyone can edit! It covers the characters, stories, locations, vehicles and vessils of the PCG Multiverse. It also includes a comprehensive Timeline of events within the PCG Universe. History Spark The spark that would inspire this Wiki started early into PCG history. In some of the earliest Series 1 games, Xaq DGAME, the first player, obsessively tried to remember what had gone before in his adventures. Chris, the maker of the games, would churn them out quickly, with many plotlines and stories being easy to forget. Xaq tried to keep everything straight, consistently asking about the latest game's connections with previous installments. As the years went by, it only became harder to keep track of his adventures - much has been lost to history. This bothered Xaq, as the franchise underwent multiple, brief revival attempts. When the latest revival, Series 2, inspired Xaq to make his own spin-off series of games (first the Pierre Series, then branching out into other stories which deviated more and more from the original formula), keeping the franchise's history straight became even more important. The level of enthusiasm only rose as Xaq introduced the games to more players, who then went on to create their own games. Timeline Finally, the itch became too much not to scratch. Xaq set to work creating a timeline of the various games in a word document on his PC. He wove his own games together with Chris', as well as new PCG makers Kurt Elfman and Keith Doomsday. The timeline was a success. It allowed the games, for the first time, to be pulled together as one cohesive universe. In some cases, it even included pictures. The various PCG makers and players enjoyed the new creation. Xaq was constantly updating it, as new games were made and played. Soon the timeline included events from the beginning of time, as told in the Soul Symphony series, and from the furthest regions of the Universe. But something was missing. The timeline followed the stories in chronological order, but if one wanted to follow a particular character's story, this was next to impossible. So at the end of the document, Xaq added an appendix of sorts - which included character bios for the first time. Other appendices soon followed, covering the other categories of the PCG world. The file was now getting extremely big - too big to print out every time he wanted to show it to someone. (This was before the days of flash drives and such). As such, Xaq was beginning to feel that this growing database needed a home on the internet. BluWiki Xaq was, at the time, a frequent editor of Wikipedia. He'd even created a matter-of-fact article about PCGs (which, sadly, was eventually deleted after being up for quite some time. The page survives on this wiki). As such, a wiki environment seemed a natural fit for the PCG database. Xaq started looking into available free wiki communities. He soon discovered one known as BluWiki. BluWiki's advantage was that it was free - anyone could contribute anything. The problem was, it was one big shared space. BluWiki could only have one article on "Earth", for example, so if someone else had made such an article, the PCG one could conflict with it. Additionally, Miles commented that he should find another site that visually resembled Wikipedia and was easier to navigate. Nonetheless, Xaq happily set up shop there. Finally, individual entries from the appendices could be expanded into their own full articles. They'd been out-growing their place in the text, and were ready to flourish on their own. And flourish they did. The timeline - which had been the original, and main, body of the text - now unintentionally took a back seat to the character bios, locations, spacecraft, and articles on the games themselves. The shift in focus highlights how much the database has evolved as it's grown. Navigation presented new challenges. Getting around the PCG section of BluWiki could be tricky, and so Xaq created lists of the various categories, with links to the pages in that category. Thus the database became a truly navigable encyclopedia. Xaq now plumbed the depths of the PCG archives, scanning in many more pictures and adding more details. It was a golden age. But eventually the issues started to pile up. The database had expanded so large it was beginning to bump into other people's content on BluWiki. Additionally, people complained that BluWiki wasn't the easiest to navigate. Its search bar was frustratingly at the bottom, among other issues. And Miles' suggestion of finding a home for the wiki that looked like Wikipedia stuck in Xaq's head. Wikia Looking into other wiki sites, Xaq found the perfect one - Wikia. Wikia was run by the same organization as Wikipedia, and so had a similar organization. It was easy to navigate, had features which BluWiki lacked like "categories" which made it easier to find pages, and best of all, each wiki was completely separate. For example, if one goes to the Star Wars wiki on Wikia and types in "Cookie Monster", he won't end up at an article from the Sesame Street wiki. Each wiki has its own set of articles - multiple wikis could have an article on, say, Earth without conflicting with one another. At the time, however, one needed to prove to Wikia that a wiki was worthy of existing on Wikia. This involved submitting an application with links to pages showing that a community of fans exists. Luckily, the Wikipedia page still existed at that time, and a few of the PCG players added their endorsements to the application. After about a week's wait time, Xaq got a response - the PCG wiki was accepted. It even got its own unique web address - pcg.wikia.com. When Xaq visited that address, he saw a fertile ground for the wiki to grow. The main page had the two boxes which still adorn the main page - Xaq soon filled them with the information that had once adorned the main PCG page on BluWiki. He began the work of transferring articles to the new home, which was arduous work. But it was rewarding. The articles looked so much nicer in the new format, and now they could be easily navigated. The BluWiki site was, bit by bit, abandoned. None of the PCG content was deleted, and much of it remains there to this day, though some of it has been vandalized. Here's the original PCG main page, having been covered with links by other users and much of its information gone - but the evidence of its original purpose still remains. BluWiki's legacy can still be seen on the new site, in the form of the various lists - such as the Games page - which wouldn't have been necessary on a wiki with categories, but which nonetheless contribute to the PCG wiki's unique character. Also, a historical oddity is the "Mystery Scripts in production" at Mystery - two of these concepts were added to the PCG section of BluWiki by non-PCG users, and then got transferred over to the new wiki. At the new site, the database could truly flourish. Once the work of transferring was complete, new editors were encouraged to contribute their own articles. Kurt Elfman contributed many articles on items, races and characters from his games; Krierre House also made in-depth articles on the gameplay of her own games. Soon, the wiki was also used to house an online play-through of "Space-Balls", as well as an original series of PCG comics, "The Perfect One".